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Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

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Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The correction will be brutal, worse than the Industrial Revolution. Has it occurred to you that there might not be a correction, and that the outcome would still be brutal, at least on par with the industrial revolution.

Do you mean as in there will be no happy ending / reset and no another century of prosperity?

Imagine you're a typesetter and they just invented computerized printing.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#403
post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where I work: - Development velocity is very noticeably much higher across the board. Quality is not obviously worse, but it's LLM assisted, not vibe coding (except for experiments and internal tools). - Things that would have been tactically built with TypeScript are now Rust apps. - Things that would have been small Python scripts are full web apps and dashboards. - Vibe coding (with Claude Desktop, nobody is using…

I think if you drop this all you will absolutely kill it.

I'm not sure. I have a buddy that's one of the better engineers I know personally, and he struggled to maintain an "AI Lent" for even a month. He found he just wasn't productive enough without it.

He did a writeup: https://buduroiu.com/blog/ai-lent-end/

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same until I’m reminded I’m paying Anthropic $100 every month for something that’s indispensable to me now and would probably pay a lot more. Very inelastic demand as long as competition is low at the frontier.

Are you paying that, or is your work paying for it? If you’re using it for personal work, why is $100 worth it?

>If you’re using it for personal work, why is $100 worth it?

I'm not who you were replying to, but:

My work pays for $100/mo Claude, I pay another $100 to bring it up to $200/mo level because:

    - Partly: I got in the habit back when work was only paying $20 and I was paying the $180.
    - It is not worth it to me to spend braincells trying to optimize my use to slip into the $100 plan, I give everything "Opus, effort max" and with the $200/mo plan I never run out ($100 I'll run out mid-morning).
    - I run a *lot* of experiments, including work-related and personal, to try to understand and improve my AI use skills.
    - I also use it for a lot of personal things, right now I'm using it to help me plan a backyard studio and ADU.
"ccusage" the past month says $1017.

edit: Formatting, ccusage

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#405
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm burning an insane number of tokens 8-12 hours a day for the dramatic improvement of some internal tooling at a big tech company. Using it heavily for an unannounced future project as well. I presume I'm not the only one.

We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time. Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of thos…

> but sure do seem to help come promo time.

I personally noticed this. The speed at which development was happening at one gig I had was impossible to keep up with without agentic development, and serious review wasn't really possibile because there wasn't really even time to learn the codebase. Had a huge stack of rules and MCPs to leverage that kinda kept things on the rails and apps were coming out but like, for why? It was like we were all just abandoning the idea of good code and caring about the user and just trying to close tickets and keep management/the client happy, I'm not sure if anyone anywhere on the line was measuring real world outcomes. Apparently the client was thrilled.

It felt like... You know that story where two economists pass each other fifty bucks back and forth and in doing so skyrocket the local GDP? Felt like that.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#406

Context: a few weeks ago, Anthropic signed a deal to buy "multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity" from Google and Broadcom [1]. There have been several previous deals, too. Some people call this sort of thing a "circular deal", but perhaps a better way to think of it is as a very large-scale version of vendor financing? The simple version of vendor financing is when a vendor gives a retailer time to pay f…

It's pretty much vendor financing (although we could argue whether it should be classed as circular investment), with the extra trick being that both sides get to make number go up with it, through stock market valuations and the ability to borrow more money to set fire to so you can show how successful you are.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#407

I find it crazy that Google considers Anthropic to be worth almost 10% of Google itself (350B valuation mentioned in the article). Anthropic gets traction but has no moat, no infrastructure and relatively small team working for it. I feel for 40B you can get a lot of very smart people and a lot of very good hardware to outcompete it.

I think the very smart people already work at Google and the 40B buys some of the rest.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#408
post #315
post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. You can actually buy several European airlines with that kind of money. For example, you can buy KLM Air france for less than $3B. It is a profitable business that does $30B in sales and $1B in profit. (and has been profitable since for the past 4-5 years)

Airlines are down there amongst cinema chains and video game retail stores in terms of being terrible businesses

Want to know the easiest way to become a millionaire?

First, become a billionaire. Then, start an airline.

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#409
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the fact!?

I mean.. kinda everything about Mythos for example? Anthropic has a good product, but they also pretty consistently say some stupid ass shit if you're being generous, and blatant lies if you aren't

Stand clear of the blast crater not everyone in tech bought the con…

Re: Google plans to invest up to $40B in Anthropic

#410
post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you able to describe any of those internal tools in more detail? How important are they on average? (For example, at a prior job I spent a bit of time creating a slackbot command "/wtf acronym" which would query our company's giant glossary of acronyms and return the definition. It wasn't very popular (read: not very useful/important) but it saved myself some time at least looking things up (saving more time than…

I have one that serves a few functions- Tracks certificates and licenses (you can export certs in any of the majorly requested formats), a dashboard that tells you when licenses and certs are close to expiring, a user count, a notification system for alerts (otherwise it's a mostly buried Teams channel most people miss), a Downtime Tracker that doesn't require people to input easily calculatable fields, a way for tea…

>> a dashboard that tells you when licenses and certs are close to expiring

Or, Excel > Data > Sort > by the Date column. No dashboard needed, no app needed.

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